My copy is missing the image wrap. Also, I scanned it and didn’t do a very good job of cropping. Can you tell that I’m procrastinating over working on a draft of something more important? No? Great!
I remember seeing this book when it first came out. I wanted it, but was unsure about spending £25 on a book about a company the the cover heavily implies is pretty boring. I was a fan of Coupland’s ‘Microserfs’, though, and the thought of him covering another monolithic tech company was pretty appealing, but not quite enough to make me purchase it. Since then I’ve read a fair few books about boring companies and would probably risjk a quarter ton on it now, if I hadn’t found a copy on eBay for a tenner.
It’s part of a series called Writers in Residence, which the back cover informs me also did editions on the USS George H.W. Bush and the IMF (unbelievable). I might see if I can find those, not because this one was so good, but because those sound like more interesting subjects.
Alcatel Lucent manufacture and sell communications infrastructure equipment. That’s phones and internet routers on the small scale, undersea fibre-optic cables on the larger side of things. It’s a fairly beige enterprise – not sexy like Apple or a technocratic superpower like Google. The book is written in a manner that injects a bit of life into it and even though the premise is centred around dull companies being interesting, by the end I found myself wishing the same approach had been taken with somewhere more engaging.
The photos by Olivia Arthur are… fine. I mean, I like a bit of communications hardware as much as anyone, so that was about as good as it got. Coupland’s prose goes on a few flights of fancy that are hit and miss. I didn’t really follow the cat motif running through the book and which the title is drawn from, but whatever.
As predicted in the book, Alcatel Lucent doesn’t exist anymore. It was acquired in 2016 – by Nokia, which perhaps tells you something about the pace of the tech industry. (Don’t let those retro 3310s fool you – Nokia is a dead company, only existing as a trademark to evoke nostalgia to sell cheap phones.)
Excerpts
If you have a culture whose brains are “planned” by books, you’ll have a citizenry who want their lives to be book-like. If you have a culture whose brains are “planned” by digital culture and internet browsing, you’ll have a citizenry who want their lives to be simultaneous, fluid, ready to jump from link to link–a society that assumes that knowledge is there for the asking when you need it. This is a very different society from one peopled by book readers
Yet the residual need for one’s life to be a story persists from the print era, especially in people born before 1970. Print era holdouts see the nonlinear children of the web as shallow and emotionally impoverished. Young people “born digital,” with no vested emotional engagement with books, view print holdouts as sould adrift in a useless sea of nostalgia.
–p60
Cheesequake State Park
p78
The [restaurant] bill arrives and Ross scratches the bottom of the receipt. I ask him why and he says, “A few years back, nobody was giving or keeping receipts for anything, so for tax reasons the [Chinese] government came up with the idea of putting scratch-and-win prizes at the bottom of all receipts. Now everybody keeps every receipt. It worked.”
p161
Photos
All pictures by Olivia Arthur. Scanned to give an indication of content, not quality (my scanner is pretty terrible).
